Online share trading platform Superhero launches New Zealand offensive

The Sydney-based online share trading platform says its users are ditching tech stocks in favour of blue chips, and is now embarking on its first international expansion.

Sydney-based online share trading and superannuation platform Superhero has shrugged off a failed merger plan with Swyftx, expanding this week to New Zealand in its first foray into an international market.

From Tuesday, New Zealand investors will be able to invest in Australian and US listed stocks, with the ability to trade New Zealand stocks to be added in coming months, chief executive John Winters said in an interview.

In December, a $1.5bn tie-up between Superhero and cryptocurrency exchange Swyftx fell apart, with Mr Winters blaming crypto volatility for the deal’s collapse. The company has put the issue behind it however, and says the timing is now right to enter New Zealand.

“I think it’s a natural progression for us to step offshore. And the beauty of it is that the tech we’ve built in-house has not required a full rebuild,” Mr Winters said.

“We’ve been able to leverage the systems, processes and procedures that we’ve already got in place and the major change has just been more on the regulatory side of things where we’ve had to be registered to provide financial services in New Zealand. And that’s all in place now so it’s cleared the path for us to launch in New Zealand.”

Superhero was co-founded by Mr Winters and chief technology officer Wayne Baskin in 2018, and its ASX trading platform has racked up over 240,000 investors. It also allows its users to invest up to 75 per cent of their superannuation into shares and ETFs.

According to Mr Winters, rising interest rates and inflation combined with the tech downturn has seen investors on the Superhero platform shift away from tech stocks to more traditional blue chips, as well as lithium stocks.

“With the lithium companies there are some that are real standouts, that have been able to get to production and get to profitability, and have managed that timing very well,” he said. “They can be seen as a proxy to Tesla, which is still the most bought US stock for us.”

Superhero is now planning new adviser functionality for its platform, which Mr Winters said will arrive later this year. He said the new features would allow financial advisers to manage their clients’ portfolios across superannuation, shares and overall wealth across a single screen.

“We want to bring everything into one place, where you can see the performance of your adviser, of your own portfolio, and your wealth all together,” he said. “It’s part of a whole range of different products that we’ll bring to market that we are very excited by, there is a whole bunch of things in the pipeline.”

Amid the tech downturn Superhero has managed to avoid making layoffs, unlike a growing number of other start-ups, and Mr Winters said his company is hiring and adding to its headcount. Swyftx axed 40 per cent of its staff in December – around 90 people – due to what it said was a downturn in the value of digital assets including bitcoin.

Superhero’s list of investors includes Afterpay co-founder Nick Molnar and Zip co-founder Larry Diamond, along with fund managers Regal, Wilson Asset Management and Ophir.

“We’ve been hiring over the past few months since we de-merged from Swyftx, and we have a number of open roles at the moment,” Mr Winters said.

“We are scaling up quite considerably across our various business units and across all our products, so we’ll need additional resources to help facilitate that. We’re well capitalised to pursue all of our growth plans, so our position is looking very good.”